What is an Asteroid?

Throughout the entire existence of humans, we have always wondered about all the things that we could find in the immensity of space and our universe. And although we still have much to discover, we have been able to uncover some of the mysteries of our universe, one of them being the asteroids.

We have all heard about asteroids and have a vague idea of what an asteroid is. But do we really know what they are? Well, in simple terms asteroids are the residues and leftover rocks and other materials from the formation of the Solar System. Long story short, those rocks were too little to be a planet.

We call them asteroids because in the sky, they look like small stars. And in the ancient Greek language, the word asteroid means “like a star”. A lot of people think that they should be called planetoids –which means “like a planet”– since they don´t make their own light and also move around the Sun.